* As ASICs become a big part of the minting process, the difficulty level will go into orbit* Anyone who wants a chunk of the coins needs to invest in ASIC equipment* With more ASIC equipment chugging on the network, won't the difficulty be so high that the rate in which the coins are minted will yield no more than the quantity being mining now on GPU rigs?* I.e The network difficulty will counteract the additional hashing power.* The only people who win here are the first on-board with ASIC equipment and the ASIC manufacturers themselves?

I wish new ASIC owners well and hope they make a packet but I can't help but wonder about the possibilities if ASICs had been ignored.

In a few years I will buy a cheap, used ASIC from ebay, put it on my desk for mining 0.00000000000000000001 BTC a day whilst having a laugh about you folks and the fuzz you made around those things. I made my peace with the fact that I missed the early-adopter phase twice now. Congrats to all already and soon-to-be ASIC owners. Print that money hard!

How so? I'm leaning on it making absolutely no difference other than you have equipment built for a single purpose with limited resale value when the difficulty balances out the power.

The higher the difficulty the more expensive it will get to use the vulnerabilities.Let's assume their is only CPU mining, like it used to be.If you get a botnet with allot of computers you might have a chance to double spend.With ASICs and a high difficulty a botnet will not help you anymore. You will have to invest into ASICs yourself which is much more expensive.

* As ASICs become a big part of the minting process, the difficulty level will go into orbit* Anyone who wants a chunk of the coins needs to invest in ASIC equipment* With more ASIC equipment chugging on the network, won't the difficulty be so high that the rate in which the coins are minted will yield no more than the quantity being mining now on GPU rigs?* I.e The network difficulty will counteract the additional hashing power.* The only people who win here are the first on-board with ASIC equipment and the ASIC manufacturers themselves?

I wish new ASIC owners well and hope they make a packet but I can't help but wonder about the possibilities if ASICs had been ignored.

So buy one and help alleviate the problem? Mining is already somewhat centralized, if you think people mining with their 1 gaming card is making a large dent in the total hashing power currently then think again.

How so? I'm leaning on it making absolutely no difference other than you have equipment built for a single purpose with limited resale value when the difficulty balances out the power.

Uh, well it's the relative difference that matters. You might think okay I go from a GPU farm to an ASIC farm and so does everyone else and now I am getting the same bitcoin as before, with all my new fancy ASIC hardware.

The thing is, if you didn't upgrade, you wouldn't get the same bitcoin as before. You would get less and less until you start to get virtually nothing as ASIC devices push difficulty higher.

So actually, it makes a massive difference. If you want to get left behind and stop making money, stick with GPU

ASIC mining is more or less the last reasonable step in mining for the foreseeable future. It is the first time hardware made solely for mining has been introduced so only those who wish to support the network will have them.

Yes initially the power is concentrated in the hands of a few. If ASICMiner or Avalon wanted to they could have attempted a 51% attack (but this would be shooting themselves in the foot rendering BTC useless and everybody would leave for another coin).

Once there are over 100k ASIC devices it would be very difficult for any government or any company to attempt to attack the network. The entity would have to design, build, power and then hash over 51%. In 2 or 3 years that would cost in the billions. Right now it could conceivably be done for millions.